Okay, so yesterday the GiveBIG website collapsed and died a very public death. Dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of Seattleites who wanted to donate money to their favorite Seattle-area nonprofits were unable to, and those nonprofits were forced to choose between either waiting out the computer problems or sending people to their own sites to donate. (The problem with the latter choice: donations directly to nonprofits wouldn't have access to the large amount of matching funds that are applied to donations through the GiveBIG site.) As we reported, the Seattle Foundation announced that GiveBIG would continue through midnight tonight.

So. There will be plenty of time in the weeks ahead for nonprofits to demand answers from Kimbia, the payment processing firm that seems to have shat the bed yesterday. Hopefully, Kimbia won't be around when GiveBIG arrives next year (especially since it seems they were charging exorbitant processing fees from the nonprofits to begin with.) But today is not the time to explore what went wrong, or to fix the problem for next year. Today is the time to GiveBIG.

Yesterday, Martin offered his three picks for literary-centric GiveBIG charities. And then I offered mine. I suggest you look through those posts, click through to GiveBIG, and donate what you can to these organizations. Yesterday's fiasco was not at all their fault, and in fact they lost a lot of money because of it. Now more than ever, they could use your support.